NHB was originally pitched for topics too incendiary for the general board. That included adult humor, flamewars, and discussions from E&C that had gotten out of hand.

When Jeff and I were co-mods of E&C, we would generally only move threads that were sort of ongoing mid-grade flamewars with no hope of becoming productive. If a thread looked to be easily salvageable, the most common response was to remove small numbers of off-topic/inflammatory posts and let the thread continue in E&C. That looks like the policy that's still in place -- decent threads with a couple of OT posts get edited to stay E&C-worthy, hopeless threads get moved to NHB, and threads that only became hopeless after playing out their usefulness get locked.

Izchak says: 'slow down. Think clearly.'April Fools Day is the one day of the year that people critically evaluate news articles before accepting them as true.

It was pitched as PG-13 originally. Although really we kinda grew out of it. Only reason sites have non-public forums like that these days is usually to hide stuff that would piss off advertisers, so pretty much a non issue here anymore. I could easily nuke it and just dump all the topics into the cafe, but I keep it around mostly because it has been there for a long time.